{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
